Acer Switch 10 review: Right idea, wrong execution

Acer Aspire Switch 10 $430.00 The Acer Aspire Switch 10 is a novel take on the 2-in-1 notebook/tablet hybrid, but both the tablet and the keyboard halves of the equation are mediocre, and the tablet's battery life is too short.

Acer tries to do Lenovo’s Yoga-series laptops one better with its Switch 10: This 2-in-1 can fold into tent, presentation and tablet modes just like those famous convertibles. But Acer’s 10-inch display can be completely detached from its keyboard dock to transform it into a true tablet.

There’s no need to fumble with a release mechanism, either. Friction catches and strong magnets hold the two components together, but the magnets are almost too powerful. They’re supposed to help guide a pair of sockets on the tablet to posts on the keyboard, but I found myself constantly needing to reseat the tablet, because the magnets seized the dock before I had an opportunity to line them up properly.

Michael Homnick

The Acer Switch 10's display can be detached from its keyboard dock to become a true Windows tablet. 

To separate the two, hold the keyboard down and give the display a strong tug. The friction catches inside the tablet sometimes take a few seconds to retract, with a disconcerting sound that had me wondering if something had come loose inside the first few times I heard it. With devices that have 360-degree hinges, presentation mode leaves the keyboard facing down against your work surface, while putting it in tablet mode leaves the keyboard facing out and against your hand.

Reversing the Switch 10’s display leaves the keyboard facing up behind it in presentation mode, and flat against the back of the display in tablet mode. Tent mode is also available for those times when your work surface is limited—such as an airline tray table.

Michael Homnick

Tent mode makes it easy to watch movies in cramped spaces, such as an airline seat. 

This clever design is somewhat undermined by a less-than-awesome display. I suppose a 10.1-inch, 1366x768 display is to be expected at the lower end of the tablet price range, but Acer’s panel doesn't get particularly bright. It's the only tablet I've used where I felt the need to keep the brightness cranked at all times. The tablet looks bulkier than its 0.35-inch thickness and 1.29-pound weight due to its wide, black bezel, with an outer silver frame. Front-firing speakers at the bottom (in notebook or presentation mode) or top (in tent mode) get impressively loud.

Michael Homnick

Presentation mode is just the ticket for PowerPoint slideshows.

The keyboard’s keys are small, flat, and surprisingly stiff. My first keystroke failed to register until I became accustomed to its tactile response and learned how hard I needed to strike the keys. The dock is also on the light side for how heavy the tablet is. It tends to slide around the desk when you tap its display in notebook mode.

Michael Homnick

Unlike laptops with 360-degree hinges, you won't feel the keys when you put the Aspire Switch 10 in tablet mode. 

The only ports on the tablet are micro and mini versions of USB and HDMI, respectively. The tablet also supports Miracast wireless video streaming if you don't want to mess with an HDMI adapter to connect the tablet to a stand-alone display. Bluetooth and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi round out its wireless connectivity. The included keyboard dock has a full-size USB 2.0 port, but no USB 3.0.

The rest of the Switch 10’s specs are standard for the lower end of the tablet range. Acer picked an Intel Atom Z3745 (Bay Trail-class) CPU and paired it with 2GB of DDR3/1066 memory. A 64GB eMMC drive is provided for storage, which can be supplemented by a MicroSD card. Acer also offers a less-expensive model with only 32GB of storage, but that's really pushing it for a machine running Windows 8.1.

The Acer Aspire Switch 10 isn't as powerful as the Lenovo Yoga 2 11 or the HP Pavilion x360. 

With standard specs comes average performance. The tablet is perfectly acceptable in day-to-day usage, but my usage is not particularly demanding: Email, web browsing, YouTube and Netflix, and Office tasks all worked smoothly. The Switch 10 outperformed the Lenovo Yoga 2 11 and the HP Pavilion x360 on the PCMark 8: Office benchmark by virtue of its flash storage, not because it’s inherently more powerful.

Both of those machines have mechanical hard drives, but faster CPUs, so both of them earned a higher Laptop WorldBench scores. And that makes it doubly disappointing that the Acer’s battery died seven minutes sooner than the Lenovo’s did (the Pavilion x360’s less-than-3.5 hours of battery life, for what it’s worth, is just atrocious).

The Aspire Switch 10 should have better battery life since it doesn't need to spin the platters on a mechanical hard drive like the HP and Lenovo machines. 

If a 2-in-1 with a detachable display is what you crave, I’d suggest taking a look at the Asus Transformer  Book T100. It’s a little thicker, but it weighs about the same. More importantly, it has a better keyboard, and the 64GB model is street-priced the same as the 32GB model of the Acer Switch 10. The 64GB version of the Switch 10 reviewed here costs $80 more.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

NEC MultiSync E232WMT touchscreen monitor review: Get the tablet experience right on your desktop

The Windows 8 user interface is designed for touching, tapping, pinching and swiping, but desktop touchscreen displays just haven’t gained the popularity that monitor makers had hoped for. At a time when you can buy a very good 23-inch non-touch monitor for less than $300, NEC’s MultiSync E232WMT doesn’t make a strong enough case that you should spend twice as much for a model that supports 10-point touch.

The MultiSync E232WMT has an interesting dual-hinged stand that easily collapses into a flat position. This renders its touchscreen more comfortable to use than when it’s vertical. The stand connects to the display by way of a standard 100x100mm VESA mount, which means you can replace it with most any third-party mount (such as an articulated arm).

The MultiSync E232WMT's double hinge allows it to be adjusted to almost any angle, including flat as a tabletop. 

The E232WMT connects to your PC via HDMI, DVI, or VGA, but it does not support DisplayPort. The high-quality AH-IPS screen has native resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, and mercury-free LED backlighting. Niceties include a built-in webcam with a stereo microphone for video conferencing, a 4-port USB 3.0 hub, a headphone jack, and a pair of internal 1W speakers. As you might imagine, the speakers sound pretty thin, but they’re good enough for system alerts and such.

No extra software is needed to use the E232WMT’s 10-point touch features with Windows 7 and later. Mac users are out of luck. I used the NEC with Windows 8.1 and found the display’s touchscreen to be responsive when tapping, using gestures, and typing with the onscreen keyboard.

NEC's engineers wisely placed the control buttons on the side of the bezel, where they're less likely to be pressed unintentionally. 

The IPS panel provides a wide angle of view. I saw no shift in color or loss of contrast when moving my head to the left or right from the center of the display. Text was clear and legible, even at small point sizes. Photos looked good, with accurate colors, lots of detail, and smooth skin tones.

The only issue I had with the display was the glare from its very glossy screen. Our offices, like many business environments, have overhead lighting. When I moved the display into a flatter position to use the touchscreen, the glare was very strong.

If you need a touchscreen for your desktop, NEC’s MultiSync E232WMT should be on your list to consider. Its high-quality screen, responsive touch capabilities, and flexible stand render it a strong—albeit expensive—contender.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Track and follow up emails with Right Inbox for Gmail

I have been using Gmail as my sole email client for years now, and I'm a big fan. But there's one key thing I need my email client to do that Gmail doesn't offer: Follow-ups. When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn't replied within a few days, so I can resend my message or find out what happened. To me, this is absolutely crucial, which is why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

Right Inbox is just one option in a highly competitive market of email reminder and follow-up services: There's Boomerang, which is pretty costly if you're using Google Apps ($15 per month). There's Followup.cc which is great, and client-agnostic, but that also means it doesn't integrate into Gmail. The list goes on, but my current favorite is Right Inbox, thanks to its seamless integration with Gmail and affordable price. This $5-month service adds a couple of new buttons that blend in well with Gmail's native ones, and presto: You can now follow-up and track emails.

Right Inbox makes it easy to specify when you want to be reminded of an email, and whether or not it should be tracked.

When composing a new email, you need only click the new Remind Me button, and specify when you want Right Inbox to remind you of this thread so you can check up on it. Right Inbox for Gmail offers several preconfigured times, ranging from hours to tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. You can't configure your own favorite intervals (one of the service's few annoyances), but you can pick other intervals using a calendar pop-up.

When a recipient opens a tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail will send you a detailed report including their location and IP address.

Right Inbox for Gmail also offers delayed email sending: For example, you could author an email during the weekend, and have it automatically sent out first thing Monday morning. Finally, you can also enable email tracking, a feature that lets you know when you recipient opened the email. Tracking uses a small, invisible image embedded into the email, so it only works if the recipient opts to display images included with the email (many email clients don't display images by default).

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Roccat Isku FX gaming keyboard hits all the right notes

There was a time when my de facto response for “which gaming keyboard should I buy” would’ve been something Razer-flavored—likely the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate ($140). Keyboard recommendations are serious business: You’ll spend all of your work and play time hammering away at these slabs of plastic, and Razer’s mechanical wares are solid, capable devices with excellent customization options—in spite of onerous software.

Roccat’s Isku FX gives me pause. It’s a bit cheaper than most gaming keyboards at $90, and offers loads of programmable keys and on-the-fly macro recording. But the Isku FX’s keys aren’t mechanical, which accounts for the disparity in price. That’s unfortunate—I’m a sucker for the clackity-clack of a cluster of Cherry MX Blue switches, and going back to comparatively soft membrane keys felt wrong, somehow.

I got over it. The Isku FX’s keys are comfortably sized and evenly spaced, so I had no trouble settling right in to work and play. The keys are backlit, and you can toggle the brightness and disable the annoying pulsing effect through Roccat’s software. Yes, you will need to install driver software; the keyboard will work out of the box, but you’ll need to head to Roccat’s website and grab a relatively small 20MB package to tweak the keyboard’s settings.

You can customize the color and lighting patterns of the keys by tweaking the driver software.

The keyboard’s layout is fairly standard, though there are a few extras scattered about. Five macro keys run along the left side of the keyboard, joined by three thumb-keys nested under the spacebar, and the macro-recording key, dedicated media keys, and a backlight toggle button planted at the top of the keyboard. The Caps-lock key has been replaced by the Easy-shift button, which can paired with a number of keys on the keyboard to activate a secondary input option. 

Only a subset of the Isku FX’s keys are programmable: the function row, media keys, the aforementioned macro and thumb keys, and that section of keys surrounding WASD that Roccat as dubbed the “easy-zone.” You can assign a secondary function to your macro keys and the keys in the easy-zone, activated whenever you press the easy-shift button. Your “Q” key will always be the letter Q, but pressing easy-shift and Q in tandem will toggle whatever additional functionality you’ve assigned through Roccat’s software. This can be as simple as calling up another key or key combination (Q becomes Alt + J), or calling up a pre-recorded macro.

Only a few of the keys are programmable, and you can activate their preprogrammed functions by holding down the easy-shift key on the left in conjunction with each key.

You can also create timers, a rather interesting function that I’ve yet to see on other peripherals. Assign a number of seconds to a macro key or trigger it with an Easy Shift Combo, and a comically raspy voice will bellow out “10” when there are ten seconds left, count down from 5, and then shout “Go!” when the timer is up. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a niche function, but if you’re playing a game where important actions happen at regular intervals (I’m thinking League of Legends’ waves of enemies) this could come in handy. I’d really love it if it timers could be built into macros, as being able to trigger an ability in an MMO and having an auditory cue of when said ability was ready for use again would be nifty; actually, can we get some game developers on that issue instead?

These customization options might seem to pale in comparison to what Razer offers — reprogram any key to do whatever you’d like — but I actually like the simplicity. Most of my key-customization happens inside of games anyway, and with a total of five profiles and two potential functions for every key within reach of my hand, there’s already enough modification-overkill built in to sate my needs. Couple this with the backlight’s decent attempt at emulating every color in the spectrum and you will not want for personalization options.

And there are achievements! I’m normally one to scoff at ridiculous extras and achievements for PC peripherals are high up on that list, but Roccat’s R.A.D. system is innocuous and genuinely interesting (to me at least). It tracks the number of times you’ve used the game-centric keys like WASD (that’s four more strokes for me right there!), the macro-keys, and the easy-shift and multimedia keys, and assigns achievements based on…well, I’m not entirely sure, as I’ve only earned one for my first 35,000 WASD strokes, an amount I’ve just about doubled. But I love the idea of quantifying little tidbits like this, and it’s easily ignored if you don’t care. The Isku FX’s driver software is otherwise painless: once I’d configured everything to my liking I largely ignored it (well, besides obsessively checking my key-press statistics).

The Isku FX excels at its primary role: turning key presses into on-screen action or words. And it does so at a fair price, and bundling lots of customization options with software that stays out of your way. I also appreciate the dedicated media keys, which are a significantly better option than futzing around with function-key combinations. I’d still prefer to pay a bit extra for the satisfying crunch and accuracy afforded by a proper mechanical keyboard. But if you don’t care about mechanical keys? Great—the Isku FX will not disappoint. 

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Pocket lets you shelve items to read and watch when the time is right

The Internet is a distracting place. Cat videos, recipes, and interesting blog posts all conspire to steal our focus and distract us from whatever we've set out to do in the first place. One way you can deal with this constant barrage of brain candy by blocking it out with procrastination-curbing applications such as Cold Turkey. Another possible way is to save all those interesting distractions for later, carrying on with your day secure in the knowledge you'll get to them when the time is right. If that sort of distraction management appeals to you, you're going to like free Web-based service Pocket.

Pocket lays out the content you've saved for later in a beautiful, easy-to-navigate grid.

Pocket started out as a service called Read It Later, which specialized in saving articles, and later morphed into a more general-purpose service that can also save videos and anything else. With the change in purpose and design came a change in name, and Pocket was born.

The idea at the core of the service is simple: You have one Pocket account, but numerous applications can plug into it to save content for later. There are browser bookmarklets and extensions, but there are also lots of mobile apps that feature built-in saving to Pocket, with Flipboard and Pulse being notable examples.

When you save a page for later using the Pocket bookmarklet, a simple overlay shows you the page was saved.

Saving an article to read later takes just a moment. Pocket doesn't ask any questions: It just saves the article, and you're done. Later, when you have time, you can access the Pocket Web app or use Pocket's mobile app, and read the articles you've saved at your leisure. Pocket even improves the reading experience by stripping out extraneous formatting and making the article look nicer, much like Readability does.

Using Pocket isn't like bookmarking content to read later: When you create simple browser bookmarks (or save links to a social bookmarking service), they stay there once you're done reading them. This makes for a very cluttered bookmark collection, mixing temporary content you'll visit just once with more permanent bookmarks you'll visit time and again. With Pocket, you get a dedicated space for all of those transient links, keeping them separate from your more permanent bookmarks; and since Pocket lets you easily mark links as read, it's easier to keep it from overflowing with clutter.

Pocket reformats articles to make reading easier and more focused.

Pocket isn't a revolutionary service, and it isn't new. But it's very useful, especially if you find yourself drawn to read articles and watch videos when you're really not supposed to.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Review: Pocket lets you shelve items to read and watch when the time is right

The Internet is a distracting place. Cat videos, recipes, and interesting blog posts all conspire to steal our focus and distract us from whatever we've set out to do in the first place. One way you can deal with this constant barrage of brain candy by blocking it out with procrastination-curbing applications such as Cold Turkey. Another possible way is to save all those interesting distractions for later, carrying on with your day secure in the knowledge you'll get to them when the time is right. If that sort of distraction management appeals to you, you're going to like free Web-based service Pocket.

Pocket lays out the content you've saved for later in a beautiful, easy-to-navigate grid.

Pocket started out as a service called Read It Later, which specialized in saving articles, and later morphed into a more general-purpose service that can also save videos and anything else. With the change in purpose and design came a change in name, and Pocket was born.

The idea at the core of the service is simple: You have one Pocket account, but numerous applications can plug into it to save content for later. There are browser bookmarklets and extensions, but there are also lots of mobile apps that feature built-in saving to Pocket, with Flipboard and Pulse being notable examples.

When you save a page for later using the Pocket bookmarklet, a simple overlay shows you the page was saved.

Saving an article to read later takes just a moment. Pocket doesn't ask any questions: It just saves the article, and you're done. Later, when you have time, you can access the Pocket Web app or use Pocket's mobile app, and read the articles you've saved at your leisure. Pocket even improves the reading experience by stripping out extraneous formatting and making the article look nicer, much like Readability does.

Using Pocket isn't like bookmarking content to read later: When you create simple browser bookmarks (or save links to a social bookmarking service), they stay there once you're done reading them. This makes for a very cluttered bookmark collection, mixing temporary content you'll visit just once with more permanent bookmarks you'll visit time and again. With Pocket, you get a dedicated space for all of those transient links, keeping them separate from your more permanent bookmarks; and since Pocket lets you easily mark links as read, it's easier to keep it from overflowing with clutter.

Pocket reformats articles to make reading easier and more focused.

Pocket isn't a revolutionary service, and it isn't new. But it's very useful, especially if you find yourself drawn to read articles and watch videos when you're really not supposed to.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Review: Pocket lets you shelve items to read and watch when the time is right

The Internet is a distracting place. Cat videos, recipes, and interesting blog posts all conspire to steal our focus and distract us from whatever we've set out to do in the first place. One way you can deal with this constant barrage of brain candy by blocking it out with procrastination-curbing applications such as Cold Turkey. Another possible way is to save all those interesting distractions for later, carrying on with your day secure in the knowledge you'll get to them when the time is right. If that sort of distraction management appeals to you, you're going to like free Web-based service Pocket.

Pocket lays out the content you've saved for later in a beautiful, easy-to-navigate grid.

Pocket started out as a service called Read It Later, which specialized in saving articles, and later morphed into a more general-purpose service that can also save videos and anything else. With the change in purpose and design came a change in name, and Pocket was born.

The idea at the core of the service is simple: You have one Pocket account, but numerous applications can plug into it to save content for later. There are browser bookmarklets and extensions, but there are also lots of mobile apps that feature built-in saving to Pocket, with Flipboard and Pulse being notable examples.

When you save a page for later using the Pocket bookmarklet, a simple overlay shows you the page was saved.

Saving an article to read later takes just a moment. Pocket doesn't ask any questions: It just saves the article, and you're done. Later, when you have time, you can access the Pocket Web app or use Pocket's mobile app, and read the articles you've saved at your leisure. Pocket even improves the reading experience by stripping out extraneous formatting and making the article look nicer, much like Readability does.

Using Pocket isn't like bookmarking content to read later: When you create simple browser bookmarks (or save links to a social bookmarking service), they stay there once you're done reading them. This makes for a very cluttered bookmark collection, mixing temporary content you'll visit just once with more permanent bookmarks you'll visit time and again. With Pocket, you get a dedicated space for all of those transient links, keeping them separate from your more permanent bookmarks; and since Pocket lets you easily mark links as read, it's easier to keep it from overflowing with clutter.

Pocket reformats articles to make reading easier and more focused.

Pocket isn't a revolutionary service, and it isn't new. But it's very useful, especially if you find yourself drawn to read articles and watch videos when you're really not supposed to.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Rein in your inbox and schedule email reminders with Right Inbox

Send an email sometime on the weekend, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be buried under a pile of other emails crowding your recipient's inbox. But what if you don't have time to send the email at just the right moment for it to be seen? If you're using Gmail, Right Inbox can do that for you. This service ($5/month or $39/year, free feature-limited demo) can also track sent emails and report when the recipient opened them, and remind you about emails that haven't received a reply so you can follow up.

Right Inbox shows up as a set of buttons on the email composition screen.No aspect of Right Inbox is really unique: ActiveInbox has been offering a browser add-on for managing Gmail more efficiently; Boomerang is another add-on that offers remarkably similar functionality. And then there are Followup.cc and FollowupThen, two services that provide follow-up reminders without any add-ons--you simply CC the service when sending the email. Finally, Google published its own way to create your own reminders using Google Docs and some scripting. But Right Inbox is more focused than ActiveInbox, better-priced than Boomerang (which costs $15 per month for Google Apps users), can do things the two follow-up services simply can't, and doesn't require any coding skills to set up.

Right Inbox comes as a browser add-on for Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. It blends into Gmail so seamlessly you may have trouble finding it at first. There is no control panel, and nothing to configure. Unlike ActiveInbox, it doesn't create lots of new labels within Gmail. It simply shows up as a few new buttons in the email composition screen, and one new button in the message reading screen.

You can use Right Inbox to snooze an email you received until it's time to handle it.When composing a new email, you can now click the Send Later button and specify when you want that email sent. While waiting to be sent, the email is stored in your Drafts folder, so you can still edit it. You can also tick the Track checkbox, which will embed a tiny invisible image into the email, and will let you know when your recipient opened the message (assuming he opted to display images you send). Finally, the Remind Me button lets you push the email into your own Inbox after some time, star it, label it as a Reminder, and even mark it as unread. You can have Right Inbox do all of this only if the recipient doesn't reply to the message, so you're not flooded with unneeded follow-up reminders.

The Remind Me button is the one that also shows up in the message reading screen: You can use it to snooze threads that don't require immediate action or are awaiting other information, and have them come back to your inbox when the time is right. This is also the only part of Right Inbox that gave me any trouble: The button wouldn't always show up, and I had to refresh Chrome every now and then to get it to display.

Right Inbox gets a lot right: The interface is simple and well-integrated, and the price is reasonable. If you're a Gmail or Google Apps user looking for an email scheduling and tracking solution, you should try it out.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download use latest version of the software on your Gmail or Google Apps account running in a supported browser.

—Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Drawing a Line in the Sandwich: Android Phone Makers Right to Keep Buttons

The death of dedicated physical buttons is killing Android phone usability.  First smartphone vendors came for our keyboards, relegating QWERTY handsets to the low-end of the market while so-called “superphones” make you hunt and peck at virtual buttons on their touchscreens. Then dedicated camera buttons started to become an endangered species. Now, with Android 4.0, Google wants to replace the dedicated back / home / menu buttons below the screen with persistent icons that sit below all your apps. Fortunately, vendors are finally drawing a line in the sandwich.

At CES and Mobile World Congress, all the new Ice Cream Sandwich phones we saw had the same row of dedicated navigation buttons below their screens you see on Gingerbread, rather than the virtual set that appears on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the only Android 4.0 phone designed by Google. An Android rep told us that the company favors virtual buttons because they change position as you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape mode. Yet, from the HTC One X and One S, each of which has back, home and recent apps buttons at the bottom, to LG’s Optimus L7 phone with its circular physical home button and the unnamed Fujitsu Tegra 3 phone with its hard-plastic buttons, everyone’s ignoring Google’s advice.

Building buttons into the UI is a waste of precious screen real estate.  On the Samsung Galaxy’s Nexus’s 1280 x 720 screen, the virtual button bar takes up a full 96 pixels or 7.5 percent of the available vertical space in portrait mode. That may not seem like much, but it could be the difference between seeing an extra photo on a web page or needing to scroll. When you combine that with a 54-pixel status bar that appears on every screen, you’re losing 11.7 percent of your screen, before you get to application-specific toolbars like the gigantic 98-pixel button row that appears at the bottom of your inbox in Gmail .

In landscape mode, the effects of this wasted real-estate are not quite as bad as the button strip cuts 85 pixels off the side of the screen while the status bar still trims 52 off the top. Still every pixel you lose hurts your usability by making you scroll.

“In theory, physical buttons are an attractive concept: they can save precious screen real estate,” Nielsen Norman Group Usability Expert Raluca Budiu told us. “You don’t need to bother with interface widgets for ‘Back’ and ‘Search’ on the screen, if you have dedicated physical buttons that do exactly that.”

Budiu said that, by removing physical buttons from Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is actually getting rid of a major usability faux pas, the ambiguous “menu” button that has so many different functions in earlier versions of Android. The problem, Budiu noted, is that buttons which look the same but have different purposes in different contexts can confuse the user. Fortunately, in Ice Cream Sandwich, the menu buttons are all built into the app itself, not into the three system-wide navigation buttons.

However, buttons like back and home which perform the same function in every app, work better with their own dedicated, physical spaces. By including discrete back, home and recent apps buttons, vendors are providing the same consistent experience you get with the button bar, but are providing a far superior usability experience that saves all-important pixels. If only, the HTCs and LGs of the world would take their new-found button-consciousness a step further and put physical keyboards and dedicated camera buttons on their high-end phones again.

Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch oversees the production and infrastructure of LAPTOP’s web site. With a reputation as the staff’s biggest geek, he has also helped develop a number of LAPTOP’s custom tests, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. Catch the Geek’s Geek column here every week or follow Avram on twitter.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

Verizon vs AT&T: Which New iPad LTE Plan is Right For You?

Big Red is advertising three 4G LTE data plans for the new iPad. The first, a 2GB a month plan, will run you $30. Verizon’s 5GB plan will cost you $50 a month, while its high-end 10GB plan rings in at $80 a month. The biggest benefit to Verizon’s iPad plans is that they allow users to take advantage of the new iPad’s hotspot feature, without piling on an additional fee.

Verizon typically charges users an additional $20 a month to activate a device’s hotspot feature. But with the new iPad at least, that fee is nonexistent. By offering free tethering the Verizon iPad effectively becomes your MiFi, allowing you to get laptops and other devices online from the road at no additional cost. Go over your data limit on any of the aforementioned plans, however, and you’ll have to fork over an additional $10 per 1GB of data used.

 AT&T

AT&T’s basic $14.99 plan, as always, is a bad joke that should be avoided.  For that price, you get just 250MB of data, an amount so small you could burn through it just by checking email a few times. If you do make the mistake of going over the 250MB limit, AT&T’s overage fee is another $14.99 for each additional 250MB of data used. If you download 1GB movie with this plan, it’ll cost you close to $

Any consumer who can do basic math will opt for at least the $30 plan, which provides 3GB a month of data, 1GB more than Verizon provides at the same price point. Go over that 3GB limit and you’ll be hit with a $10 fee for each additional gigabyte used. AT&T’s top-of-the-line data plan offers 5GB of data at a cost of $50 a month, the same price as Verizon’s 5GB a month plan. Like AT&T’s 3GB plan, the 5GB plan also includes a $10 overage fee for each additional gigabyte used.

However, the biggest issue with AT&T’s plans is that they don’t include a free hotspot feature like Verizon’s do. AT&T has already gone on record stating that their version of the new iPad will not support Wi-Fi tethering at launch. That may change over time, but as of this moment, it’s a strike against the AT&T.

On its other devices, the company currently requires users to purchase the $50 a month 5GB data plan in order to even use Wi-Fi tethering. If AT&T hopes to compete with Verizon it needs to offer free tethering at any plan level on the new iPad.

Conclusion

If tethering matters to you — and if you have a laptop, it should — Verizon is the carrier to turn to for your new iPad needs. However, if you don’t take any other computers on the road with you but your iPad, AT&T does offer more data at the $30 sweet spot. That said, we have yet to test how the tablets function on either telecoms’ network. But when we do, we’ll publish the results.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

Top 10 Tablets Available Right Now

The iPad is far from the only tablet in town. The slate market has exploded with big players from Lenovo, Acer, Sony, and ASUS bringing their unique take on slates to the table. There’s the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which pairs with an innovative detachable keyboard, making it ideal for work and play. Then there’s the ThinkPad Tablet, which is compatible with a stylus for drawing and taking notes on the fly. Whether you’re a fan of Apple or Android, these are the top 10 tablets to buy now.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here